Stories about packs of wild dogs roving around midtown are decades old. Urban legend has them in all breeds and sizes, running side streets at night, rummaging through trash, eating pet rabbits, threatening humans, and fighting with domestic dogs. But Grant Stauffer has seen dogs roaming his isolated neighborhood north of Linwood Boulevard. He says a pack lives on the…
In the middle of rush hour on Thursday, September 21, 60 cheering people on bicycles streamed slowly past the corner of Westport Road and Broadway. Behind them, a line of slow-moving cars grew several blocks long. Cyclists clad in Lycra rode next to others wearing beat-up sneakers and faded T-shirts; rickety bicycles wobbled along beside sleek mountain bikes. In this…
It took less than a minute to draw blood. A few jabs into round one, boxing superstar Christy Martin drove an uppercut straight into the face of Sumya Anani, a virtual unknown from Shawnee. Anani’s head snapped back and her body stiffened for a split second. But she didn’t buckle. Something inside her 140-pound frame awoke and forced her forward….
At first, you don’t want to admit it, because it seems somehow wrong—just too easy. After all, the woman on the other end of the phone line is not that woman seen every Sunday night on HBO, lamenting the sad, sorry state of her love affairs. She’s not an actress or a character, but a real person—an author of two…
Bombay away! Kansas City’s Taj Mahal restaurant is hardly the only American business boasting that famous name. Donald Trump’s Indian-style casino and hotel complex in Atlantic City is called Trump Taj Mahal and features several restaurants, including a coffee shop called the Bombay Cafe that serves American dishes with Indian names, such as the Bombay cheese steak (the same sandwich…
The Taj Mahal is the extraordinary marble mausoleum completed in 1648 by India’s fifth Mughal emperor, Shah Jehan, in honor of his wife, the Persian princess Mumtaz Mahal, who had died in childbirth 18 years earlier. It’s considered one of the world’s most beautiful works of architecture.A crudely painted portrait of the famous shrine hangs on the plate-glass window of…
21 Thursday Earlier this month the city of Galveston, Texas, commemorated the 100-year anniversary of a hurricane known only as The Great Storm (the weather service didn’t name hurricanes in 1900). It killed an estimated 6,000 people (one-sixth of the city’s population) and destroyed virtually all of Galveston, which at that time was a thriving seaport second only to New…
Luis Rodriguez is a household name in some pockets of America, such as his native East L.A. He has published two poetry books and a critically acclaimed, award-winning gang memoir, Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. (1994). Yet his popularity has remained underground. Where word of his memoir has spread, censors have fought to remove it from…
At age 12, dancer Leonard Crofoot received high praise indeed when his ballet teacher, George Zoritch, told the young man that his style was reminiscent of the great Vaslav Nijinsky. “I didn’t know who he was,” Crofoot says of the dancer who revolutionized ballet in the early part of the 20th century. “But since that time, Nijinsky has come…
The changes are noticeable from the minute visitors walk into the lobby of the Missouri Repertory Theatre, now under the artistic leadership of Peter Altman. The banners that once hung from the ceiling to advertise upcoming shows are gone, coffee prices have doubled, and someone thought to obtain a catering license — booze flows where soft drinks once prevailed….
It’s now all the rage to describe things that once were “cool” as “sick,” so Sickend has the benefit of a buzz word built into its name. Among Sickend’s other selling points: well-crafted tunes that see the band execute subtle variations in pace, a singer/ shouter (Steve Brown) who’s skilled at conveying angst by repeating the same phrase at elevating…
One of the metal scene’s most consistent crews, Turnstyle celebrates its fifth furious year with a new four-song demo that offers no concessions to flavor-of-the-month sounds. The quartet’s strength has always been its ability to balance rugged grunge-style melodies with battering breakdowns, as it does expertly on such crunching tunes as “Blanket” and “Fallen.” Anchored by rumbling basslines and persistent…
Nothing makes heartbreak go down easy like homemade ice cream, and Rex Hobart and the Misery Boys will scoop out plenty of both at 3 p.m. on Saturday, September 23, at Recycled Sounds. As part of a festive weekend celebrating The Spectacular Sadness of Rex Hobart and the Misery Boys that includes a CD release party with Mr. Marco’s V7…
Tribute albums are an odd thing. It’s a pleasant gesture for new acts to pay homage to their influences, but the results can sometimes be painful (for example, Rammstein’s rape of Depeche Mode’s “Stripped” or the bungling of The Clash’s catalog by the likes of Third Eye Blind, Silverchair, and Ice Cube). But when the stars are in alignment, the…
Wyclef Jean has some valid reasons for beefing about lack of respect. His brilliant debut, Wyclef Jean Presents the Carnival, received much less hype than his Fugee bandmate Lauryn Hill’s less adventurous Miseducation, and it’s likely that, as he implies on the opening track of The Ecleftic, some bigwigs at his record label greet his solo records with impatience in…
When scrolling through the list of acts with which The Daybirds have been compared, a few names appear repeatedly. There’s Radiohead, Squeeze, David Bowie, Ben Folds Five, and even early Chicago, before Peter Cetera turned the group into AOR staples. However, the sentence “The Daybirds sound like …” ends most frequently with the name of a band that’s straight…
A master of direct confrontation as the singer for the incendiary punk trio Bikini Kill (whose “Suck My Left One,” “Sugar,” and “Outta Me” were among the most eloquent emotional outpourings of the past decade), Kathleen Hanna has seemingly mellowed, at least musically. Her current group, Le Tigre, released a self-titled album that delved into cheery new-wave dance dynamite,…
A sure way to avoid the tour sponsorship issue altogether is to call your little jaunt the “Enough with the Piss Bag” tour. But when you’ve had a catheter stuck in your penis, a bladder infection, and a 38-day fever — all related to an abscess of the perineum that fermented a quart of pus in you while you hallucinated…
Try to resist the urge to yell “Focus!” during the first five minutes or so of An Affair of Love. It’s been a while since we’ve seen a director actively use such tools as focus and color to hint at deeper truths, but Frederic Fonteyne (Max and Bobo) knows what he’s doing. For the streets of Paris, and most…
“This song explains why I’m leaving home and becoming a stewardess,” Anita Miller (Zooey Deschanel) says to her well-meaning, overbearing mother, as the soundtrack begins to swell with the low hums of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. Just a few seconds earlier, Elaine Miller (Frances McDormand) had insisted she wouldn’t allow such filth in her house — “They’re on pot,”…
Russian Roulette Absolute tariffs: Patrick Quinn’s story involving international intrigue with a local connection, “To Russia with Food Coloring” (September 7), was both engaging and thought-provoking. The author’s credibility did slip a bit with the unsupported claim that “an artificially low price … has created an enormous demand for illicit liquor.” There is nothing “artificial” about $2.50 for a liter…
“It’s a loss to the community … (but) we’re happy with our programming as it is. “That’s what Patricia Cahill, general manager of public radio station KCUR 89.3, told Kansas City Star gossip peddler Hearne Christopher last month. Cahill was sounding off in one of Christopher’s many columns about the fact that classical stalwart KXTR 96.5 had been kicked to…
Attack Ads: If local commercials look a little ragged lately, chalk it up to the six-month-old strike of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) and the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). Since May 1, when the unions struck radio and TV advertisers for fair compensation from cable and Internet broadcasts, Kansas City’s acting and voice-over industries have been…
In 1971, Paul Edwards had just finished a high-profile, two-year stint as president of the Westport Community Council. To many in Westport, he was a hero. The city had been proposing to turn Pennsylvania, from Penn Valley Park to the Plaza, into a four-lane thoroughfare, but Edwards had helped stop the plan. As Edwards said in an interview with…
